David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Old Friends Or Lovers
I was becoming awed by the wide horizon of the speech that arose out of an individual life lived in a single era and generation. I was becoming attracted to the writer’s creativity.
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Posts Tagged: typewriters
Typewriters Created the Original Text Art
Before there was email circulating ASCII artwork, there was the typewriter. Hyperallergic looks back at the avant-garde world of typewriter art that includes everything from the abstract to the geometric.
...moreThe Comic Sans Typewriter
Artist Jess England has created a Comic Sans typewriter, dubbed the Sincerity Machine. England explains the genesis of the project on his website: As part of my ongoing thesis of questioning how we create, consume, store (and fetishize) media, it’s my wish that a classic, functioning typewriter altered to write in the most popularly despised […]
...moreA Modern-Day Typewriter
The personal computer may have revolutionized the way writers write, but distractions from the Internet and social media may not make it the ideal tool for writing. Designer Adam Leeb has created a hybrid typewriter called a Hemingwrite. Long battery life, instant on, and a mechanical keyboard help make Hemingwrite feel more like a typewriter or […]
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Ungumming the Keys
On the cusp of my 30th birthday and just days before the birth of our second child, I decide to do the practical thing and purchase a pair of nonfunctioning typewriters.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Video game anti-heros. Technology is making everything beautiful. One way technology is making everything awesome (as discussed above): A video of deans losing their cool. Another opinion: Get technology out of school. Forget your soul. What happens to your e-books after you die? Tom Hanks has an app that taps into typewriter nostalgia. You can […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
THIS. THIIIISSSSS. And this history of “This.” Can Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) save the crumbling ivory towers of higher education? “Tech companies, in their many guises, always tell stories about the future of the world.” Kids these days are not impressed with your old-fashioned writing devices. Internet slang isn’t as new as you think it […]
...moreTypewriters Are Latest High Tech Spy Tool
In the wake of American spies tapping into every form of electronic communication, Germany is considering typewriters for highly sensitive documents. The Russians have already instituted such measures. Typewriters aren’t foolproof though. In 1984, the Soviets listened to the keystrokes of US Embassy secretaries, looking for patterns. Meanwhile, for less sensitive documents, there is Typing […]
...moreWhy is Your Keyboard Weird?
Key arrangement isn’t the only thing modern keyboards borrow from a bygone age. We get the term “shift key” from the way a Remington Model 2 Type-Writer physically shifted the printing bar between uppercase and lowercase. Uppercase and lowercase are themselves much older terms, referring to a 15th century method for keeping track of the […]
...moreBefore QWERTY
Before life on the iPad keypad there was life on the QWERTY computer keypad, and before that, the architecture of the typewriter. Dan Piepenbring reports on the history of the typewriter which was, ah yes, “rife with collaboration, ingenuity, betrayal, setbacks, lucre, acrimony, misguided experimentation, and bickering white men.”
...moreDigital Age Changes Writing
Technology has changed the way writers write, and that change is not just about the rise of e-books. Composition in a digital world is much more malleable and fluid, and changes in methodology alter the structure of sentences and words. Author Tom McCarthy tells the Guardian: Writing with word processors has given a new organisation […]
...moreWriting in Prison
Drugs and petty crime landed Daniel Genis in prison for ten years. He spent his term reading and working on his three-hundred page novel—but only after dropping $375 on a clear plastic typewriter, the only model he was allowed. Genis spoke with The Airship, describing what it was like writing from prison: A typewriter contains […]
...morePictures Made from a Thousand Words
“Art-typing,” or using a typewriter to create visual art, first stemmed from experimenting stenographers and then blossomed in the 1950s with the concrete poetry movement. A new anthology, Typewriter Art, looks at the history of this form. Brainpickings has a review and some stunning samples.
...moreExistence of Typewriter Confuses and Angers Internet
Shortly after moving to New York, writer C. D. Hermelin decided to try a cool busking experiment: he’d sit out in parks with an old typewriter and compose on-the-fly stories for passersby, asking them to donate what they could. It was a lot of fun—until someone posted a picture of him online and the Internet […]
...moreNo New Typewriters
Godrej and Boyce, the only company in the world that was still building typewriters, has closed its last plant.
...moreMorning Coffee
Spring! (almost) German prison cells are mostly nicer than my apartment. Words get in David Byrne’s way. Technically this is about old type interfaces, but let’s be honest here it’s just typewriter design porn. The sun is out today, and this house’s above ground pool is all sorts of appealing. What this country needs: Jonathan […]
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